So Instagram launched IGTV today. Actual standalone app, actual event in New York, Kevin Systrom up on a stage talking about how people (young people, mostly) watch more video on their phones than on TV now. Along with it they announced Instagram has crossed a billion monthly users, which is a genuinely wild number to type out. A billion. For a photo-sharing app that started as basically a Polaroid filter toy in 2010.
Anyway I downloaded it on my lunch break because of course I did, and I have Thoughts.
The whole pitch is that IGTV is vertical-only. Full screen, portrait, no black bars, nothing landscape allowed. Most people get a ten minute cap per video, verified and bigger accounts can go up to an hour. And I get why, honestly, Instagram's own numbers say most video on the platform already gets watched vertically because people aren't going to rotate their phone for your content, they're going to scroll past it. Fair. But sitting there holding my phone up watching a ten-minute vertical video felt less like "the future of TV" (their words, not mine) and more like watching someone's home movie that never got cropped. My arm got tired. That's a real complaint I have, my arm got tired holding a phone up to watch something that was trying to be appointment viewing.
I've been doing this blog since November 2011, which by internet standards makes me basically a fossil, and I've watched a lot of "this is the new video thing" launches come and go. Vine. The original IGTV-shaped thing that was just Instagram video in-feed. Facebook Watch, which I dont think anyone I know has ever opened on purpose. What gets me about IGTV specifically isnt the format, its that its a whole separate app for something that's going to live entirely inside the ecosystem of another app anyway. There's a little TV-shaped icon in the main Instagram app now that takes you to the same content. So why do I also need this on my home screen? I already have YouTube, Netflix, the Twitter video tab, Twitch if Im feeling old-man-yells-at-cloud about it, and now this. My phone has 64GB and I genuinely resent every megabyte IGTV is about to eat up with cached video.
The bigger thing nagging at me is the format lock-in. No ads at launch, they said, which is the standard move: get creators in, get habits formed, worry about monetization once people cant leave. Ive seen this movie. It worked for Instagram Stories, which absolutely ate Snapchat's lunch over the last year, so I'm not going to sit here and say it wont work again. But Stories copied a format that already existed and made it better distributed. IGTV is asking people to make an entirely new kind of video (long, vertical, phone-native) that doesnt really exist anywhere else yet. Somebody has to be first to figure out what a good ten-minute vertical video even looks like, and right now most of what I saw browsing around during setup was just creators talking directly into the camera, which, fine, but that's not exactly appointment television either.
I'll say one genuinely positive thing: the no-swiping, no-scrubbing-through-ten-other-clips-first setup is nice. You open it, a video plays, thats it. Compare that to opening YouTube and getting shoved a home page of eleven thumbnails you didnt ask for before you can watch the one video someone sent you a link to. There's something to be said for an app that just plays the thing.
Still not deleting it in a week though, calling it now. I give it two weeks on my home screen before it gets buried in a folder called "Video" that I never open, next to Facebook Watch and the three podcast apps I installed and abandoned this year. If Instagram wants me actually watching ten-minute videos held up over my face, they're going to need better content in there than what I found scrolling through it this afternoon, which was mostly beauty tutorials and one guy reviewing sneakers I will never buy.
We'll see. Ask me again in a month.